“Armed Forces” means the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard

Security renders lawfare a tool of violent biopolitical governance---the result is endless violence

Security, not liberty: the ‘permanent emergency’ of the security society

The US military’s evident disdain for international law, indifference to the pain of ‘Others’ and endless justifying of its actions via the language of ‘emergency’ have prompted various authors to reflect on Giorgio Agamben’s work, in particular, on bare life and the state of exception in accounting for the functioning of US sovereign power in the contemporary world.111 Claudio Minca, for example, has used Agamben to attempt to lay bare US military power in the spaces of exception of the global war on terror; for Minca, “it is precisely the absence of a theory of space able to inscribe the spatialisation of exception that allows, today, such an enormous, unthinkable range of action to sovereign decision”.112 This critique speaks especially to the excessive sovereign violence of our times, all perpetrated in the name of a global war on terror.113 Minca’s argument is that geography as a discipline has failed to geo-graph and theorise the spatialization of the ‘pure’ sovereign violence of legitimated geopolitical action overseas. He uses the notion of the camp to outline the spatial manifestation and endgame of a new global biopolitical ‘nomos’ that has unprecedented power to except bare life.114

In the ‘biopolitical nomos’ of camps and prisons in the Middle East and elsewhere, managing detainees is an important element of the US military project. As CENTCOM Commander General John Abizaid made clear to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2006, “an essential part of our combat operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan entails the need to detain enemy combatants and terrorists”.115 However, it is a mistake to characterize as ‘exceptional’ the US military’s broader biopolitical project in the war on terror. Both Minca’s and Agamben’s emphasis on the notion of ‘exception’ is most convincing when elucidating how the US military has dealt with the ‘threat’ of enemy combatants, rather than how it has planned for, legally securitized and enacted, its ‘own’ aggression against them. It does not account for the proactive juridical warfare of the US military in its forward deployment throughout the globe, which rigorously secures classified SOFAs with host nations and protects its armed personnel from transfer to the International Criminal Court. Far from designating a ‘space of exception’, the US does this to establish normative parameters in its exercise of legally sanctioned military violence and to maximize its ‘operational capacities of securitization’.

The US military’s liberal lawfare reveals how the rule of law is simply another securitization tactic in liberalism’s ‘pursuit of security’; a pursuit that paradoxically eliminates fundamental rights and freedoms in the ‘name of security’.119 This is a ‘liberalism’ defined by what Michael Dillon and Julian Reid see as a commitment to waging ‘biopolitical war’ for the securitization of life – ‘killing to make live’.120 And for Mark Neocleous, (neo)liberalism’s fetishization of ‘security’ – as both a discourse and a technique of government – has resulted in a world defined by anti-democratic technologies of power.121 In the case of the US military’s forward deployment on the frontiers of the war on terror – and its juridical tactics to secure biopolitical power thereat – this has been made possible by constant reference to a neoliberal ‘project of security’ registered in a language of ‘endless emergency’ to ‘secure’ the geopolitical and geoeconomic goals of US foreign policy.122 The US military’s continuous and indeed growing military footprint in the Middle East and elsewhere can be read as a ‘permanent emergency’,123 the new ‘normal’ in which geopolitical military interventionism and its concomitant biopolitical technologies of power are necessitated by the perennial political economic ‘need’ to securitize volatility and threat.

Conclusion: enabling biopolitical power in the age of securitization

“Law and force flow into one another. We make war in the shadow of law, and law in the shadow of force” – David Kennedy, Of War and Law 124

Since the inception of the war on terror, the US military has waged incessant lawfare to legally securitize, regulate and empower its ‘operational capacities’ in its multiples ‘spaces of security’ across the globe – whether that be at a US base in the Kyrgyz Republic or in combat in Iraq. I have sought to highlight here these tactics by demonstrating how the execution of US geopolitics relies upon a proactive legal-biopolitical securitization of US troops at the frontiers of the American ‘leasehold empire’. For the US military, legal-biopolitical apparatuses of security enable its geopolitical and geoeconomic projects of security on the ground; they plan for and legally condition the ‘milieux’ of military commanders; and in so doing they render operational the pivotal spaces of overseas intervention of contemporary US national security conceived in terms of ‘global governmentality’.129 In the US global war on terror, it is lawfare that facilitates what Foucault calls the “biopolitics of security” – when life itself becomes the “object of security”.130 For the US military, this involves the eliminating of threats to ‘life’, the creating of operational capabilities to ‘make live’ and the anticipating and management of life’s uncertain ‘future’.

Some of the most key contributions across the social sciences and humanities in recent years have divulged how discourses of ‘security’, ‘precarity’ and ‘risk’ function centrally in the governing dispositifs of our contemporary world.131 In a society of (in)security, such discourses have a profound power to invoke danger as “requiring extraordinary action”.132 In the ongoing war on terror, registers of emergency play pivotal roles in the justification of military securitization strategies, where ‘risk’, it seems, has become permanently binded to ‘securitization’. As Claudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster point out, the “perspective of risk management” seductively effects practices of military securitization to be seen as necessary, legitimate and indeed therapeutic.133 US tactics of liberal lawfare in the long war – the conditioning of the battlefield, the sanctioning of the privilege of violence, the regulating of the conduct of troops, the interpreting, negating and utilizing 24 of international law, and the securing of SOFAs – are vital security dispositifs of a broader ‘risk- securitization’ strategy involving the deployment of liberal technologies of biopower to “manage dangerous irruptions in the future”.134 It may well be fought beyond the battlefield in “a war of the pentagon rather than a war of the spear”,135 but it is lawfare that ultimately enables the ‘toxic combination’ of US geopolitics and biopolitics defining the current age of securitization.